What is Lotus Connections?

IBM Lotus Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers.

Connections is comprised of 6 primary features:

Homepage	Profiles	Activities	Blogs	Communities	Dogear (Bookmarks)
See what's happening across your social network	Find the people you need	Organise your work and tap your professional network	Present your own ideas, and learn from others	Work with people who share common interests and expertise	Save and share bookmarks

Why use it?

Lotus Connections was the first enterprise-ready complete social software solution that covered the main bases of social profiles, communities of interest, blogs and shared bookmarks.  It offers a wealth of features, intuitive and customisable user interface, integration with most Lotus products and also many from competitors and has a flexible and cost-effective on-premise licensing model.

Connections is 'profile-focused' (where many other packages are 'document-focused' or 'team-focused' - it deals with the world of social interactions from a perspective of your user-centric collaboration.  The product's primary concern is to find the right individuals within your network to assist you with the task or project that is being undertaken.  Thus it features excellent social profiles - a mix of contact details, user-created experience/skills information, tags and relationships - which can be extended to include almost any kind of user data from an organisation's directories, HR or database system.

From there, Connections adds on the social services that each user would need, including the ability to:

• create, update and manage their own blog(s)
• read and comment on other's blogs
• share and collaborate and tasks and projects in the form of 'Activities'
• build or to join 'Communities of Practice' - groups of like-minded individuals around a common topic, interest or set of best practices
• add, manage, share and track social bookmarks - links to web-based resources such as internet pages, intranet applications, images, blogs, news articles and documents
• track all the latest updates across their social network from a central location

Lotus Connections offers a complete suite of social features in one single package which means it is an excellent solution for small businesses and enterprises alike, whilst still offering plenty of integration and customisation points allowing it to be extended to suit your organisation's complete set of requirements.

Our Lotus Connections solutions & services

Collaboration Matters is delighted to offer a range of solutions and services based on the Lotus Connections product, including:

Organisational Social Readiness Analysis

Is your business a collaborative organisation?  If not, is it ready to become one?  

Making the change between being a traditional business where knowledge might be locked in individuals' heads or within departmental silos, to a collaborative organisation where (amongst other attributes) the 'knowledge of all the staff, customers and suppliers is shared and pooled to optimise the organisation's operations and opportunities' is clearly a very significant transition.  Deploying Lotus Connections successfully will certainly assist, but only alongside cultural and organisational change to embrace the new methods of working.

Our Social Readiness Analysis program is designed to assist with the process of discovering to what degree an organisation is already collaborating successfully, what areas most need improvement, which aspects of social software will be of most benefit and who the key individuals or teams will be in the deployment process.

Consultancy and Design

As probably the most experienced Lotus Connections specialists in the UK, Collaboration Matters are ideally set to design and architect new systems.  Working closely with your IT and communications teams, we will delivery high-level and detailed technical design documents, including aspects such as clustering and high availability, performance and tuning, integration and customisation.

Deployment, Upgrades, Customisation & Integration

We offer the full range of technical services to get your Lotus Connections system up and running, fully adapted to your organisation's requirements, integrated with any Lotus or many 3rd-party systems and then to keep it running efficiently.

Training

Collaboration Matters has a full range of Lotus Connections training resources at hand to assist your organisation to be ready to implement, support and use the solution. These include:

• 2-day and 5-day Administrator training courses
• 2-hour end-user training workshops
• Virtual training for end-users - a series of 'bite-sized' videos along with exercises and reminder sheets

All courses can be delivered on-site at your own location, at a neutral venue convenient for your staff or at our own training offices.  The courses and materials can, of course, be customised to support your organisation's own requirements.

Hosting

Many organisations do not wish to have the responsibility for hosting and managing their own Lotus Connections systems - for a smaller business it is often an unnecessary complication and/or risk that detracts from the value to be achieved by implementing the social software solution.  Collaboration Matters can take away this concern by hosting your own dedicated Lotus Connections system in our datacentre facility.

Ready-to-deploy Pilots

It is a common requirement to run a small-scale Lotus Connections pilot to explore the value obtained from the software and to build a more detailed specification for the full-scale production deployment.  To make this process as painless and cost-efficient as possible, Collaboration Matters has a number of ready-build Connections Pilot systems that are available to be installed in your organisation for 30/60/90-day periods.  Supporting up to 250 users, these systems can be configured to connect to your LDAP directory and to be themed to match your own corporate standards.  When you're ready to procure a full production environment, the data can be migrated from the Pilot system into your own infrastructure (or onto one of our own hosted systems).